"Coachability” in a player is willingness to take on new ideas (from the coach; from team mates; from anywhere, in fact) coupled with the drive to improve, together with sufficient self-awareness to assess the relevance and applicability of a coaching intervention to the player’s own developmental needs.

Coachability is not about creating automatons. It is not good enough that the athlete simply follows the coaches’ instructions.

Unless it is a safety issue (“mixed” bowling actions in cricket, tackling techniques in rugby), a coachable player has to be able to make up his or her own mind. Maybe 9 times out of 10 (99/100), the coach and/or textbook will still be right; the remaining 1 out of 10 might just be “genius”! And more often than not, it has to be the athlete who says “no, that just doesn’t work for me”.

Caveat – I am not a “performance” coach; I work mostly with children at the “participation” stage, so whilst I would love to have more “coachable” players in my own groups, my role is more to prime the development of potential performance players. My definition of coachability derives from this role.

I think Andrew has really nailed this one. I was going to talk about growth mindet. We talk about this a lot in a coaches approach, but doesn't it need to be part of the make up of the person being coached too.

I would agree with Dave - I think Andrew has offered excellent definitions and further discussions...

Some things to add:

-Coachability should be a two way thing - Athletes learning from coaches, and coaches learning from athletes. How 'coachable' are you as a coach? would be an interesting question to pose...

- 100% linked to mindset - and a positive step change in this area would (should?) increase the coachability of a player

- I would also suggest it isn't just down to the player being open to coaching, but also developing the ability to interpret/synthesise ideas and concepts, and also be aware of how these experimentation experiences evolve performance improvement

Here are some further/random thoughts - some you may have already touched upon:

I wonder whether our perceptions about who is coachable or not in our teams or squads are shaped by our athletes individual characteristics (e.g., gender, age, experience, performance level, personality, physical characteristics) including psychological make up (e.g,, committed, resilient, ambitious).

I also wonder whether coaches' philosophy, mindset, personality, qualifications, achievements also shape their perceptions or judgements about who is coachable and who is not.

Finally and most importantly ,coaches' views about who is coachable in the team or squad may affect the ways he/she coaches them. Coachable athletes may be more likely to receive the best quality coaching when compared to uncoachable athletes (though could it be that amongst uncoachable athletes are some talented athletes)??

Finally-finally, couid it be that the coachable athlete is the athlete with the most potential according to their coaches?